One poster, for the Power-C drink, ran with the line "More muscles than Brussels" with text including "Popeye had it easy ..."; another had the headline "Keep perky when you are feeling murky" with a reference to using the drink to ward off illness and use work sick days to "just, erm, not go in". A third poster made references to the benefits of vitamins and avoiding a trip to "the doctor's waiting room".

The Advertising Standards Authority received three complaints, which argued that the ads misleadingly implied that vitamins in the drinks conferred health benefits and made them equivalent, or even superior to, vegetables – and that the drinks made people resistant to illness. Two of the complainants argued that the advertising positioned the drinks as healthy when in fact they contained high levels of sugar.

Coke said the ads were "humorous and irreverent" and that the the products could actually be described as "low calorie" according to EU nutrition and health claims regulations.

The ASA upheld all the complaints against the three ads. The watchdog said Coca-Cola had not provided evidence to support the various claims made in the ads and had breached the advertising code. It ruled the company should not run them again.

The ASA also said the drinks could not be considered to be "healthy" because each 500ml bottle contained 26% of the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

"Because we considered the ads made claims that were likely to be understood as referring to the nutritional and health benefits of the drinks, it was likely that, in conjunction with these claims, readers would infer that the range of drinks were 'healthy'," said the ASA. "Because the drinks contained a significant proportion of a consumer's RDA for sugar we concluded the ads were likely to mislead."

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